


After before (and before)

by TryingToBe



Series: Parallel Character Studies [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jiaying-centric, Minor Jiaying/Cal Zabo, Past Character Death, Referenced past suicide, Skye | Daisy Johnson-centric, deals with themes of oppression, referenced canon violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28939980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TryingToBe/pseuds/TryingToBe
Summary: Daisy was gone. They took her. And when Jiaying lost her daughter the second time, she thought there was something wrong, fundamentally, with a world that was so set on taking from her.-A study of Daisy and Jiaying, mothers and daughters, family history, and power.
Relationships: Jiaying & Skye | Daisy Johnson
Series: Parallel Character Studies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2164725
Comments: 9
Kudos: 34





	After before (and before)

**Author's Note:**

> This stemmed from an idea I had that I couldn’t fit in my fic, You’re okay (just hang on). I ended up writing a bunch about Jiaying and it’s now a sort of parallel character study of her and Daisy that is longer than the original fic…Anyway, hope you enjoy.

It started with the birth of a baby girl in China.

No. It started before then.

It started when blue angels fell from the sky.

No. It started before. It started before and before and..

On July 2, 1988, Daisy Louise Johnson was born.

She was born in China.

It was a hot summers night with a big moon in the sky.

Her mother decided to clean the house. Her father could not speak Chinese.

And Daisy Louise Johnson was born in China.

She was born loved, but she would not grow to know it.

When her second daughter was born, Jiaying whispered the girl’s name for the field of flowers where her first born lay to rest.

She hoped and hoped that evil would never find her. That history would not repeat itself.

She hoped for peace.

For ten months, she had that. For ten months, in China, the Johnson’s were a family.

But Daisy Johnson was not raised in China.

She was raised in a Catholic orphanage in Hell’s Kitchen by nuns who scared kids with stories of God’s wrath. She was raised in foster home after foster home that sent her back until she understood that there was something wrong, fundamentally, with her. She was raised on the streets of New York and Boston and Chicago and Los Angeles and behind the screens of computers that connected the entire world.

Or maybe she was not raised at all.

When Jiaying was born, a long time ago, she came into the world quietly, and to a 4.4 earthquake.

Earthquakes were not unusual to the area. In fact, they were quite unusually frequent, if oddly localized. So perhaps the baby found the tremors soothing.

Her mother whispered her name and hoped, “One day, you will not have to hide. One day, you will be safe. One day, the world will not fear you and hate you. One day, our people will be free.”

It was at this precise moment that the baby started to cry. Perhaps she did not believe her.

Calvin Johnson was born and raised in the midwest United States.

This is west to the rest of the world, and north to the US. 

He was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which, strangely enough, was only 81 miles from Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where Phil Coulson was born and raised.

For many years Cal never left home. But after his mother Louise passed, he decided to see the world.

He joined Doctors Without Borders and his whole life changed.

When Cal met Jiaying, she saved the life of a patient of his.

It almost killed her to do it, but she could heal the man, so she would.

“I control energy. Its all a give and take. Balance,” she explained to Cal after.

“Beautiful,” Cal whispered.

“I never age,” said Jiaying coyly with a smile.

Cal laughed.

They walked together in the moonlight, and they spoke in soft whispers.

“Its incredible, you’re power.”

“No,” Jiaying explained gently, “You have power. I have a gift.”

Cal nodded, but he didn’t understand. Jiaying had a gift, but it was her heart he noticed, first.

Daisy Johnson was born an American citizen through ‘acquisition’ laws.

She was a child born abroad in wedlock to a U.S citizen and an Alien.

Cal had laughed at that, “Alien. They have no idea.”

Her parents were legally married at the time of her birth.

They planned to move to Wisconsin. There was a great little charter school not far from Cal’s practice.

And she was born after November 14, 1986. The U.S citizen parent in question, Calvin Johnson, was physically present in the United States for five years prior to her birth, at least two of which were after the age of 14.

So Daisy Johnson, daughter of Calvin and Jiaying, is an American citizen.

But in the beginning, the Johnson’s stayed in China.

“For a while longer,” Jiaying said. “I want her to remember where she comes from.”

“Yes,” Cal agreed. “And we’ll visit, too.”

They had plans.

Kora was born in Afterlife on a winter morning in 1958.

She was a shy sweet child who clung to her mother’s leg.

Her mother kept her sheltered and she grew into an anxious and fearful adult.

“Some stories have witches and dragons and bad men and I will always protect you from all of it,” Jiaying promised. But she could not protect her daughter from herself.

Jiaying could not protect her mother either.

“Everything I’ve done, everything I will do, is for the protection of our people,” her mother had told her, before she left her. No, before she was taken from her.

And it was because of this, Jiaying knew, that she came out the way she did. So she tried to raise her own daughter differently. She tried to do the right thing and somehow, it came out all wrong.

When her daughter died as her mother died, Jiaying knew it was her fault. Maybe there are some lessons that a daughter cannot learn from her mother.

When Jiaying met Cal, they made plans.

She would not make the same mistakes she did before. She would be a doctor. She would help people. They were going to live in Wisconsin. They were going to build a life. A new one. A good one.

Jiaying thought they would be happy there.

In 1989, an old man with power cut out Jiaying’s heart, and that was when it started.

No, it started in 1983 with a young girl lying in a field of daisies buried in the weight of her mother’s fear and the threat of a man with a knife.

No, it started in 1945 with a man holding a woman down and forcing her to touch an ancient diviner.

No, it started 5,000 years ago with a young man who was captured and tortured and when they finally stopped cutting away pieces of him he came out of the cocoon as a _we_ instead of an _I_.

It started before then. It started before and before and before.

Daisy was kidnaped on April 23, 1989.

She was taken away from her family and brought to America.

Daisy Johnson is an American citizen through acquisition laws.

But no one knew that.

No one knew anything about Daisy Johnson at all.

So, on April 26th, 1989, Mary-Sue Poots, daughter of no one, was born in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.

“It will save her life,” said Agent Avery.

“It’s for her own good,” Agent Lumley agreed.

Daisy’s parents looked for her.

Cal recognized the insignia.

He saw it on the building where his wife was cut to pieces. He saw it on the vehicles outside their village in Hunan. He saw it on the corpses in the aftermath of the massacre. He saw it this time on the image of the Agent who took his daughter.

The eagle stared up at them. The land of the free.

_Not for me_ , Jiaying understood. _Not for my daughter._

“SHIELD,” said Cal, glaring down at it. He paced. “They knew. They must have!” he exclaimed. “That must be why they took her. Because of her gift.”

“No.” Jiaying snapped, “Because of their power.”

But Cal did not understand.

In 1991, after Agent Avery was tortured and killed and her body dumped like garbage, their last solid lead went underground.

Daisy was gone. They took her. And when Jiaying lost her daughter the second time, she thought there was something wrong, fundamentally, with a world that was so set on taking from her. A mother was not meant to outlive her daughters.

She wanted no part of this life. She went back to Afterlife.

Jiaying tried to explain to Cal. “It is because you have power but are not powerful. Whereas I am powerful, but have none. And our daughter, she is like me.” Their daughter is like her, like she is like her mother, and before and before and before.

But all Cal heard was that he was not enough.

“I should have done more. I should have,” his fists clenched and his whole body shook with the fire of his rage and guilt, “I should have been there.”

And Jiaying thought this was true. This _must_ be true. Because what good was power if you were not there to save your daughters?

“Yes. You should have.” Her voice was ice cold.

“I made a promise to you. To protect her if anything happed to you. I failed. But I’ll make it right. You’ll see. I can fix it.”

But Cal did not understand. There was no fixing this. There was no going back. But more of her people were out there, and Jiaying could still protect them, so she did, as her mother did.

Jiaying remembered.

While Cal searched and experimented and hunted, she remembered.

Jiaying remembered war. She remembered tragedy. And she remembered her mother who dreamed of a world where her daughter would be free to exist.

She remembered her mother’s fear, when villages were being raided, that she would be captured. That her gift would be used against them.

It happened before. It happened with hostages and violence and a long time ago with a swaying force that they could not resist.

It was passed down generation to generation, mother to daughter. It was handed over with dire warning, with untold grief, with grim acceptance, with necessary resilience, with kindling defiance.

Jiaying did not remember what her mother remembered. But she remembered the life leaving her mother’s eyes before she was dragged away.

And it was because of this, because she was her mother’s daughter, that Jiaying understood.

Skye did not remember.

She searched and lied and broke laws because she wanted to have something to remember.

She had a fantasy. She had happy smiles and gentle embraces. She had a nightmare. She had raised voices and the clash of anger and fear.

She had parents who wanted her and would keep her and would love her. She had parents who gave up on her and would hurt her and didn’t love her.

She had a name. She had a birthdate. She had a culture and a country and grandmothers and grandfathers. She had nothing at all.

None of this was true. All of this was true.

Skye was an orphan who lived in a van, and if there was anything before she did not know it.

Jiaying thought of her second daughter more often than she wished and not as often as she owed.

She thought of her with every new Inhuman she brought to Afterlife and gave another chance.

And when she thought of her second daughter, she thought of her first daughter too. Sisters. She couldn’t think of one without thinking of the other. And she thought that maybe they were together now, that maybe somehow they found each other.

Jiaying thought of her daughters as she walked the halls she used to walk. In the rooms where she read to her, and cried with her, and held her. In the field of daises where she lost her. She thought of stories that she never told and promises she didn’t keep.

She thought of her with grief that lived inside her body and breathed her lungs and pumped her blood. She thought of her with hope that just refused to die.

She thought of her, and, more often than not, she wished she could just forget.

Many years ago, when Jiaying learned what the price of her gift was, she cried. Power, she understood, came at too high a cost. So she cried and she begged for them to not put this weight on her.

She did not have a choice. She had a solemn responsibility that needed to be carried out. A lesson to be continued that is owed to all who come after her.

Many years later, when Skye learned that she is powerful, she cried. She cried because her friend was gone and she had power that she couldn’t control and didn’t choose and that was too much.

When Jiaying sees her daughter for the first time after twenty five years of searching and hoping and remembering, she wants nothing more than to pull her close and wrap her in her arms.

But she doesn't. Because her daughter does not understand. Not yet. And that must be her choice.

Choice, Jiaying knows, is important.

On the outskirts of Afterlife, Skye learns to move a mountain.

They stand next to each other, Skye and Jiaying, side by side. They are not that far from a field of daisies. Nothing is ever far from that field of daisies.

“You’re not going to hurt me,” Jiaying tells Skye. And finally, finally, Jiaying gets to say the words the she has been wanting to say to her daughter for thirty two years. The words that she wanted to say to her mother before her.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Skye learns to move a mountain.

Power does not feel like she thought it felt, Skye learns. It doesn’t feel like fear and panic or even like winning a battle of control. Power feels like harmony. Like the whole world is at her fingertips and she is a part of it. Finally a part of it, instead of being on the outside, looking in.

She looks over happily to Jiaying who smiles proudly at her and touches her arm.

It feels like coming home.

When Skye sees her mother for the first time after twenty five years of searching and hoping and dreaming, she can’t believe that this world could possibly be so kind as to give her what she wanted most.

Jiaying brushes her daughter’s hair gently over her shoulder.

For Skye, it is a dream come true. The desperate fantasy of a lost and lonely little girl longing for a mother.

For Jiaying, it is a fragile thing that she didn’t dare dream of. The fleeting whisper in her sleeping mind that the word daisy meant more than a peaceful resting place.

They are so close to each other. But still, they cannot reach each other. There is something between them.

Jiaying thinks, SHIELD-the organization that made abundantly clear over the decades that it would never accept her.

Skye thinks, SHIELD-the family that she found and loves and can only hope will still accept her.

But it didn’t start with SHIELD. It started before.

“And what will SHIELD do with a foreign Inhuman? Once they have rounded us all up for their list. For our own good, of course.” Jiaying asks her daughter pointedly.

But Jiaying’s daughter was raised in an orphanage, in foster homes, on the streets of cities across the country, behind the screens of computers that connected the entire world, or maybe not at all, and she already understands.

“Yeah,” says Skye. “Im not crazy about it either. But the index was going to happen whether I agreed to it or not. I don’t have the power to change that.”

“I know.”

“But there are good people at SHIELD. I can get them to listen to me. To make it better, for all of us.”

Jiaying’s daughter is very young. She dreams of saving a world that is set on destroying her.

Jiaying understands. She was like that, before.

They stand across from each other, mother and daughter. They are on opposite sides of a war that Jiaying started just a few days ago.

No. They stand next to each other. They are on the same side of a war that started before and before and-

No. They stand. They stand and they fall. They stand and they fall and they live and they die.

And they do it all again.

“This war started decades ago, when SHIELD was founded to guard the world against people like us. And it will never end.” This is the truth that Jiaying knows in her bones. Because she is her mother’s daughter, and she understands.

“This is about hate.” Skye looks at her mother like she sees her for the first time. Like she understands.

“No. You’re wrong.”

No. _No_. Skye does not understand. Jiaying understands. Her daughter is gone. Her daughter is gone because _SHIELD took her_. She was another casualty. And this woman they left behind is a stranger. Another enemy ready to _take_.

Jiaying has a _gift_. The one thing that is _hers_ that they have never been able to take away.

Jiaying understands. She _does_.

Cal doesn’t understand everything that maybe he should have understood.

When he thinks of a village in Hunan and an orphanage in New York and a school in Wisconsin, he thinks of 1988 where in his heart he is still, and if he thinks about it he knows that he does not understand.

But Cal understands this. He made a promise. He made a promise because he loved his wife. He made a promise because he loved his daughter.

Twenty six years later on an airstrip of a floating ship in the middle of the ocean, Cal keeps his promise.

When Daisy loses her mother the first time, she doesn’t understand what it is about her that is so fundamentally unlovable. But even as she has the thought she knows it is not true.

She stands at her mother’s grave and Melinda May stands beside her.

Daisy- because she is Daisy now, Skye died with Jiaying or maybe Skye died with Cal or maybe Skye died with Trip- Daisy looks down at the grave.

The grave says ‘In loving memory’ because that is what you put on grave stones. Because that was what you did when people were gone. You loved their memory.

Daisy remembers.

Daisy remembers as she buries her mother side by side with May.

Daisy remembers years later as she digs up her mother’s bones to save the man she loves as her own father.

Daisy remembers war. Maybe not the traditional kind, but war all the same. She remembers tragedy. It is the kind of remembering that seeps into her body and buries in her bones. It hides there, where it chokes her lungs and swallows her skin and burns her veins. The kind of remembering that weighs down her chest and lifts up her spine all at once.

Daisy remembers. She remembers a mother who dreamed of a world where her daughter would be free to exist. She remembers her mother’s fear. The kind that lives inside her blood, and her mother’s blood, and before and before and before. She remembers grief that she has no memory of. That she did not live, but that is alive in her still.

Daisy does not remember what her mother remembers, but she carries the weight of those memories with solemn responsibility all the same.

And Daisy remembers other things too. She remembers the feeling of power when she moved a mountain. She remembers that it is not something to be afraid of. And more than anything, Daisy remembers that she is here because her mother was, and before, and before, and before.

And this, Daisy thinks, is the power of a gift-that it came from somewhere.

So maybe Skye didn’t die after all. Maybe she was just given a gift.

Jiaying’s daughter is very young and very old. She is young enough to remember powerlessness and old enough to understand control.

She carries the cynicism and mistrust and betrayal that only the young can, when they look out to the world and realize that it is not what has been promised to them. She carries the hope and reverence that only time gives, when it reveals all the beauty that has been hidden so as to survive.

She is young enough to dream of saving the world. She is old enough to know that it is a world worth saving.

Jiaying’s daughter wears a badge with an eagle on it. And she fights for everything that comes after the befores.

In 2018, Daisy Johnson and her SHIELD team find themselves in the unfortunate situation of being stuck in a time loop to the end of the world.

And when Daisy saves the world that is set on destroying her, it is her mother’s blood that pulses through her veins, healing her, saving her.

Daisy laughs with grief. With acceptance. With resilience. With defiance.

Daisy Johnson could save the world, so she did.

But she never learned that from her mother. Maybe there are some lessons that a daughter cannot learn from her mother.

She learned it in the smiles of young children, in good people who needed a break, in strangers who united over a common cause, in people who came to get her underground and people who flew away from her in space. She learned it from generations before her that she never met. In doors opened and lifelines passed down.

Or maybe she never learned it from anyone at all. Maybe it was already there. She just had to find it.

When Daisy meets her mother the second time, she learns that her mother loves her sister. It is not the same as her mother loving her, but it is the closest she has ever gotten. Her sister does not understand.

“You were better off without one,” says Kora.

“No, I wasn’t.” This is the truth that Daisy knows in her bones. Because she is her mother’s daughter but she was not raised by her mother, and her mother loved her sister more than anything, and if she could have, her mother would have loved her, too.

When Daisy meets her mother the second time, she understands. She understands because she is her mother’s daughter and she is powerful. And because she is powerful and because the world is full of weak people with power, it has tried its best to take it from her.

It tried with her like it tried with her mother before her.

It tried with needles. And before with gravitonium. And before with a scalpel. And before with gas and money and technology. It tried with fists and boots. And before with drugs. And before with threats and with words and with guns.

It tried with good intentions. It tried with greed. It tried for the greater good. It tried with sadistic pleasure. It tried without regret. It tried with guilt. It tried with willful ignorance. It tried with prideful arrogance.

It tried, always, with entitlement.

It tried and it tried and it tried.

But still, she is powerful.

When Daisy loses her mother the second time, she understands that there is something wrong, fundamentally, with a world that leaves the innocent full of guilt and the weak full of power. And she vows to take it all back.

Several hours and 36 years later in a ship in space facing the man who killed her mother, she does.

In 2015, Daisy Johnson was born in a cold temple in an underground city in San Juan.

She was born in the ashes of her friend. She was born with the unremembered memories of all her people who came before her. She was born with power in her veins and thunder in her bones. She was born loved, and she will always know it.

Her friend loved her enough to die for her.

It happened there, in the city underground. It happened again in the door of a quinjet. It happened in an explosion in space. It happened on the beach of Tahiti. It happened over the balcony of the control room. It happened on the ground of a temple. It happened on the floor the Zephyr.

I happened on the airstrip of a floating ship in 2015.

It happened in a lower floor of the Lighthouse in 1983.

She loved them then.

She loved her father even when he couldn’t remember her. And her sister even when she didn’t know her. And her mother even when her mother couldn’t love her back.

She loved and loved and she loves still.

And even though they’re gone, she’s still trying to be better.

And it is because of this, that she understands.

It is because of this, that she can look at her mother and think both, _I forgive you_ , and, _I will never become you._

_You’re my mother,_ she thinks, _and I’m your daughter._

And that explains everything perfectly. And that explains nothing at all.

And Daisy tries to say this. Or at least part of it. She tries to say that she loves her and she forgives her. And she understands. More than _anything_ , she understands.

But all she has time to say is, “It’s okay.”

**Author's Note:**

> So…Daisy and Jiaying just hit me so hard and I don’t think I really even got why until I wrote this…I would love to hear what you thought  
> Also, I put in one of my favorite mcu quotes, if anyone spotted that :)


End file.
